From what I recall it was never intended to be a stand-alone way to do art but rather to create posed figures to give the new digital painters a layer template upon which to for their painted art. It caught on while Zygote was still the to go place for amateur Poser stuff but seeing the potential of using it as a stand-alone animation and rendering too especially to export into Bryce which was popular as was RayDream Designer. It took off from there as more and more people saw the potential for amateurs to get into 3D arts relatively cheap and easy and Zygote turned to DAZ and helped the market along at a great pace giving us better content than Poser had out of the box! I hated the Poser 4 figures look and unable to get images I really liked deinstalled the app. But when DAZ released Millenium1 figures especially Vicky 1 I happily went back to it and have been squatting there ever since, my wallet a perennial captive of DAZ! That is of course until DAZ forgot who put them on the damn map and went their own way leaving Poser and loyal long time Poser users in the dust. Good business for them but not so good for us. For a while Renderosity has been offering good Poser content but I see the trend as I saw it with DAZ of more and more product for D/S and less and less for Poser.